I speak with a lot of customers about digital transformation who choose to start their journey by focusing on their intranet, sometimes with a demo our intranet solution, Fuse. Often, the real starting point for the conversation is less about the solution I am demoing and more about the employee data needed to create a truly engaging experience. And that brings us to the most overlooked aspect of employee engagement solutions… user profiles.
My simple definition of a user profile starts with what we all understand is a login, user name and password. While simple, if the only thing we capture about an employee is user name and password, it’s going to be very hard to create an employee engagement solution. Most organizations understand this, which is why additional fields are created to complete the user profile, not unlike what you do when you create a LinkedIn or Facebook profile. The definition of the user profile is usually not the issue, it’s whether that definition has any data.
Have you ever searched for someone, found the person you are looking for but their picture is missing? Or wanted to know what city a person is located in or business unit a person works for but the information missing? Worse yet, you know it to be incorrect. It should go without saying that employee engagement solutions are designed around employees, but when designing a new Intranet, the focus is often on the design of the home page and less on the content captured for employee user profiles.
My suggestion is to visualize two home pages, one for the Intranet and one for the employee. Think about the content of user profiles just like you think about the content for a home page. What information needs to be there? Are we capturing the right information? If not, how do we do that? Equally important, how can we update missing information before we go live?
If you take the simple step of visualizing your employee user profiles as a “home page” and prioritize their completeness like your Intranet’s home page, you will end up with a far better foundation to build your employee engagement solution. That foundation is what will enable employees to connect with one another not only through your Intranet, but collaboration tools as well.
Complete Employee Profile